Agile Risk Management: People

Have ever heard the saying, “software development would be easy if it weren’t for the people”? People are one of the factors that cause variability in the performance of projects and releases (other factors also include complexity, the size of the work, and process discipline.) There are three mechanisms built into most Agile frameworks to address an acceptance of the idea that people can be chaotic by nature and therefore dampen variability.

Team size, constitution and consistency are attributes that most Agile frameworks have used to enhance productivity and effectiveness that also reduce the natural variability generated when people work together.

The common Agile team size of 7 ± 2 is small enough that team members can establish and nurture personal relationships to ensure effective communication.

Agile teams are typically cross-functional and include a Scrum master/coach and the product owner. The composition of the team fosters self-reliance and the ability to self-organize, again reducing variability.

Long lived teams tend to establish strong bonds that foster good communication and behaviors such as swarming. Swarming is a behavior in which team members rally to a task that is in trouble so that team as a whole can meet its goal, which reduces overall variability in performance.

Peer reviews of all types have been a standard tool to improve quality and consistency of work products for decades. Peer reviews are a mechanism to remove defects from code or other work product before they are integrated into larger work products. The problem is that having someone else look at something you created and criticize it is grating. Extreme programing took classic peer reviews a step further and put two people together at one keyboard, one typing and the other providing running commentary (a colloquial description of pair programing). Demonstrations are a variant of peer reviews. Removing defects earlier in the development process through observation and discussion reduces variability and therefore the risk of not delivering value.

Daily stand ups and other rituals are the outward markers of Agile techniques. Iteration/sprint planning keeps teams focused on what they need to do in the short-term future and then re-plans when that time frame is over. Daily stand-ups provide a platform for the team to sync up on a daily basis to reduce the variance that can creep in when plans diverge. Demonstrations show project stakeholders how the team is solving their business problems and solicit feedback to keep the team on track. All of these rituals reduce potential variability that can be introduced by people acting alone rather than as a team with a common goal.

In information technology projects of all types, people transform ideas and concepts into business value. In software development and maintenance, the tools and techniques might vary but, at its core, software-centric projects are social enterprises. Get any group of people together to achieve a goal is a somewhat chaotic process. Agile techniques and frameworks have been structured to help individuals to increase alignment and to act together as a team to deliver business value.

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[…] risk by damping the variance driven by complexity, the size of the work, process discipline and people, we still need to “ROAM” the remaining risks. ROAM is a model that helps teams identify risks. […]